Family advocate, Monroe County at odds over rejected grant money

A national family advocacy group is lambasting Monroe County for its recent decision to turn down grant money that would have provided free legal services to poor families caught up in the child protective services system.

Richard Wexler, executive director of the Virginia-based National Coalition for Child Protection Reform called the county's move "callous political expediency, at best."

At issue is the county's rejection of a $2.6 million grant awarded by the state Office of Indigent Legal Services (ILS) that would have allowed the Monroe County Public Defender's Office to create a model program to offer legal services to parents in child protective proceedings and proceedings that could potentially terminate parental rights.

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The county is grappling with increasing case loads and some poor ratings.
Meaghan McDermott, Virginia Butler

The Public Defender's Office submitted a plan for the funding in response to an ILS Request for Proposals issued in March. Public Defender Tim Donaher, whose office prepared the application, declined to comment on the rejection.

But Wexler didn't hold back:

"What Monroe County is saying is really this: If poor people ever got the same quality of defense the middle class can buy for itself and if those poor people were able to challenge our lousy decisions, poor casework and meaningless cookie-cutter service plans, we'd have to up our game," he said. "We'd have to stop taking away so many children needlessly, and provide real help to families."

Jesse Sleezer, spokesman for Monroe County, said in a statement that the grant was rejected largely because it "could have unintended consequences on the county's efforts to keep children and families safe."

He said although the program is well-intentioned, it would have "injected lawyers into cases of abuse and neglect much earlier, potentially intimidating child victims and limiting access by Child Protective Services workers who would otherwise assess and monitor the child's safety."

Sleezer said on Friday that Monroe County had asked ILS to amend the terms of the grant to trigger legal services to parents only after a court proceeding had been started, rather than during the CPS investigation phase. But that request was rebuffed, and the county opted to decline the money in what officials believe is the best interest of children.

The grant refusal comes at a time when there's increased scrutiny on the efficacy of Monroe County's Child Protective Services. As the Democrat and Chronicle reported during last year's high-profile murder trial of a Spencerport woman convicted of beating 3-year-old Brook Stagles to death in 2016, the local CPS office was underfunded and understaffed, leading to overwhelming caseloads for investigators there.

The county has said that while CPS did have contact with Brook during the weeks before her death, the girl exhibited no signs of abuse or neglect at the time. Still, Brook's family members question whether more aggressive actions by CPS could have saved her life.

After Erica Bell was convicted in September of second-degree murder for Brook's death, Monroe County Executive Cheryl Dinolfo announced an 8-point plan to boost child welfare programs by adding CPS investigators and boosting their pay, providing them with new technology and reestablishing a local child abuse and maltreatment hotline. In all, Dinolfo boosted CPS spending by $1.6 million in her 2018 budget.

She also added $1.7 million to the budget for child abuse prevention programs.

But Monroe County Family Court Judge Joan S. Kohout, who wrote a letter in support of accepting the grant, said turning down the money further disadvantages parents who already have limited, or nonexistent resources available.

"Child protection caseworkers have access to their legal staff at any time before petitions are filed or afterwards, and families who have financial means can and do consult with their attorneys and treatment providers before or after cases come into court," she said. "So this grant would have really helped families understand the system of laws that apply in their case and provide them with advice about what's best for them and their children, and with the additional support of a social worker, would help them access those services."

According to the Office of Indigent Legal Services, the grant money would have allowed Donaher's office to set up a program modeled on New York City's 16-year-old Center for Family Representation, which provides free legal representation and social work services that aim to help keep children safely with their parents, and keep children out of the foster care system. The organization's mission: "To keep families together."

According to the organization's website, it works with more than 2,100 families annually, and consistently prevents more than half of its client's children from entering foster care.

Taxpayer savings

The bottom line is a potential financial saving to taxpayers and fewer placements into foster care. According to the center, the minimum cost for keeping one child in foster care in New York is more than $30,000 per year, while CFR services cost just $6,500 per family, regardless of the number of children. CFR estimates the agency's work has reduced the state's cost for foster care services by $37 million since 2007.

"The lack of meaningful defense is one of the main reasons so many children are taken needlessly from everyone they know and love — often when family poverty is confused with 'neglect' — and consigned to the chaos of foster care," said Wexler. He noted that studies have shown that in typical cases, children who stay in their family homes have better long-term outcomes than "comparably maltreated" children placed in foster care.

Indeed, a 2007 study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, showed children who stayed with their families were less likely to become teen mothers or become involved in crime and were more likely to hold jobs as young adults.

Kohout said taking the money would have also benefited child protective workers and the families they serve.

"Child protection also needs more help," she said. "They don't always have the time or the means to provide all the help that parents need, we don't have enough preventive services and there's not enough mental health assistance for families, especially children."

The grant would have put additional resources into play as "an additional avenue for poor families to get that kind of help," she said. "Shouldn't we all work together in a positive way to get all the resources possible?"

Still, Sleezer said there was concern such a program here would endanger children, not help them.

"The attorneys involved in this pilot program would serve only one client — the parent accused of abuse — and would not have any professional responsibility to serve the best interests of the abused child," he said.

Cindy Kaleh, Democratic minority leader of the Monroe County Legislature, said she would have liked to see the legislature get the chance to discuss whether or not to accept the grant or have a had a heads-up explanation of why the county administration ultimately rejected the grant.

"I think it could have been handled differently, I would have liked it to come before the legislature, and if we didn't like it we could dismiss it," she said. "I think they refused to be on the side of caution. But it would have been nice to hear from the administration why they felt such a large sum of money attached to a successful New York City program couldn't have been supported here."

The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform holds that the child welfare system wrongly punishes parents for poverty and harms many children by needlessly placing them in foster care when a better approach would be to give more families living on the margins the supports they need to remain safely intact.

And, Wexler said, high-profile abuse cases often trigger "foster care panic" among child protective workers and the politicians who oversee human services departments. In the aftermath, he said, caseworkers are more likely to adopt an indiscriminate "take the child and run" approach to their work out of fear that the next high-profile case could be one they worked on.

"That's not safer for the child, but it is safer for the caseworkers and a great way for politicians to score points," he said.

Wexler said he's hopeful county officials could still change their minds and accept the grant.

"It's not forever," he said. "If it didn't work out, the county could still stop the program. But it comes at no cost to the county financially, but with an enormous potential benefit to children.

"The only downside for the county is if you're playing politics with children's lives."